It is for creating one-line strips for free, with predefined characters and objects - so easy to use! For all this time I spent working as a Web Designer I met so bizzare people and dealt with so many different situations… and I think this is the best way to present them. These guys made a hell of an effort to make this work and furthermore - this looks fantastic.

Here is what I created in 10 minutes.
.

Don’t mind me saying - but I created my own strip blog as well.
Try and enjoy!

and just use it in tests like this:

[via Robby on Rails]

In order to see the point of this wallpaper, turn your laptop upside down If you have a desktop, it’ll be a bit tricky.

Anyway, here it is and let me know what you think.

You can find more free 1280×800 widescreen wallpapers on this page.

Order belongs_to User
Order has_many OrderItems
OrderItem belongs_to Product

So, when displaying an order I found myself doing accessing product through order_item, i.e. @order.order_items.product.name.

Although this worked problem was that even though I have told Rails using :include to eager load order_items it didn’t load products, so whenever I accessed a product it executed a separate SQL query. In other words, to display order with 10 products it required 11 SQL queries - hardly optimized.

Rails API documentation doesn’t say anything about eager loading “second” level, but after some searching I found that you can do that you can do nested :includes, like this:

This will eager load User and OrderItems, but it will also eager load Products under each OrderItem. This decreased my number of queries from 11 for 10 product order to only one (big one).

You can read more (for example, it appears that you can nest multiple :includes) about this undocumented feature in ‘The beauty of a nested ‘:include’ option’.

There are localization plugins that make life easier, but most of them are rather complex, hard to use and have significant overhead (i.e. takes time to setup, learn, etc.). Fortunately, plugin called Localization Simplified aims to simplify localization as much as possible:

Fast and easy localization of one-language applications. Adds UTF-8 support for Ruby + database. Modifies ActiveRecord errors + html error helpers, Date/Time helpers, locale time formats, to_currency, to_sentence

It’s easy to use mainly because it only overrides existing Rails methods, so you don’t have to do anything special to use it.

Localization Simplified is a great plugin which you can download from Ruby Forge.

In order to keep all our wallpapers in one place, we decided to create a separate page for all of them. So, if you wish to check them out, go to this page, or follow the link below.

Much more to come very soon!

View All 1280×800 Widescreen Wallpapers

The only problem is that this is still in only in Edge Rails, i.e. it’s not yet in stable Rails release. But there’s a really simple way to add source code annotations rake task to non-Edge Rails app:

svn export http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/trunk/railties/lib/tasks/annotations.rake \
 lib/tasks/annotations.rake

For more information about Rails source code annotations see Ryan’s blog.

Insert query syntax looks like this:

INSERT INTO table (primarykeycol,col1,col2) VALUES (1,2,3) ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE col1=0, col2=col2+1

If there is already a row with primarykeycol set to 1 this query is equal to:

UPDATE table SET col1=0, col2=col2+1 WHERE primarykeycol = 1

Ordinarily to achieve the same result you would have to issue an UPDATE query, then check if there were affected rows and if not issue an INSERT query. This way, you can do everything in one step - first try insert and then update if insert fails.

One situation for which this type of syntax is perfect is when you work with daily counters. For example, you might have a table with PostID, Date and Count columns. Each day you’d have to check if you already created an entry for that day and if so increase the count column - and this can be easily substituted with one INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE query.

Unfortunately there are some caveats. One being that when you have multiple unique indexes it will act as if you had an OR condition in WHERE clause of UPDATE query. This means that multiple rows should be update, but INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE will update only one row.

For more information you should read article in MySQL manual: INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE Syntax

First, click on the buttons below the cycle and choose from (Mono, Contrast, Triad, Tetrad and Analogic). Then, play around with colors and see what you’ll get. Use variations to set the colors perfectly. There is also a simple preview where you’ll be able to see how colors fit. I prefer dark and light pastels myself.

Here is the link to Color Scheme Creator. Enjoy.

I still haven’t had chance to look at the new improvements but it seems that Niceforms now supports keyboard only navigation, scalable buttons, increased browser support, etc.

Unfortunately it still has some of the problems I tried to fix more than a year ago. Granted they tried to fix it, but it still has problems. For example, when you click on a select element if you move over some options and then move out it will immediately close the drop down. On the other hand if you open select element and don’t move over to any options (i.e. click on down arrow), but you move the mouse away from it - the select will remain open, which can again lead to strange effect where you can have a lot of open drop downs.

Perhaps that can be fixed in future versions - or at least I will try to make a patch for it.

If you want to get Niceforms 1.0 you can from author’s site.